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This month, Tawam Hospital staff and patients are celebrating the first anniversary of the Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Patient (CUSP) program, an initiative designed to help ensure patient safety. The program allows frontline caregivers to identify and address hazards through steps such as measuring the safety-related culture of the unit, leveraging the wisdom of frontline personnel about the dangers facing patients, and opening the lines of communication between caregivers, managers and executives.
The CUSP program, developed by Johns Hopkins physicians in 2001, is a mission-tested approach that has elevated safety consciousness across clinical units at the John Hopkins Hospital and numerous facilities outside the United States. It has helped to significantly reduce the incidence of surgical-site infections, ventilator-associated pneumonia, bloodstream infections, and wrong-site surgeries.
According to hospital staff, Tawam has seen a number of positive changes since implementing CUSP last year. They include reducing turnaround time from 4.5 hours to 1.5 hours for many critical and routine lab results in the intensive care unit, and implementing a medication safety and data transfer program, which has resulted in a quicker average time for nurses to locate a medication.
Tawam Hospital managers also have found that implementing CUSP has led hospital staff to be more open about reporting incidents and errors. CUSP’s slogan, "Learning from Defects," has become a deeply ingrained part of the hospital’s culture.
“The CUSP concept is a new and unique initiative to bring to a hospital in the Middle East,” said Steve Matarelli, M.D., chief operating officer, Tawam Hospital. “Tawam is one of the few UAE healthcare institutions to launch a patient safety project such as this and we are committed to move forward with it.”
At Tawam Hospital, the intensive care, neonatal intensive care and pediatric oncology units inaugurated CUSP in 2008. According to hospital administration, these units were selected because of their high concentration of patients and potential for safety risks. In 2009, three more units will join CUSP.
Tawam Hospital is managed by John Hopkins Medicine and owned and operated by SEHA, the Abu Dhabi Health Services Company, which is responsible for the curative activities of all the public hospitals and clinics in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.
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